The Cultural Impact

Of

Mathematics

Copyright @ 2009 Stanley Cotter. All rights reserved

THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF MATHEMATICS

UNIT II: MATHEMATICS AND MUSIC
INTRODUCTION
A few years ago most people would have greeted the idea of
linking mathematics and music with considerable amazement.
It seemed incredible that music, the art which comes closest to evoking man's emotional states, should be related to mathematics, his
most rational creation. Then, with the advent of computers and their
much advertised ability to "compose" music,1 it became generally recognized that music was accessible to mathematical analysis. People
no longer question the fact that computers can be programmed to
compose fugues like Bach or ballads like the Beatles.2 Yet, it would
be a gross distortion of history to believe mathematics and music had
nothing to do with each other prior to the computer revolution.
The very fact that computers can be programmed to recreate
historical styles of music and synthesize new ones points to an understandable logic in the organization of the elements of musical
composition. This logic stretches back to the first composer who discovered that the twanging of his bow gave him more satisfaction than
the release of its arrow.
Man orders the universe around him and does so in ways that
bring him pleasure. Tone patterns are among the most pleasurable
ways of ordering time. Indeed, so intense is this pleasure that music
has evolved as one of the most complex and original of man's creations. It is no mere coincidence that the development of music in
western civilization has coincided with the growth of mathematics. At

certain critical points in their histories they have mutually nurtured

each other. The earliest mathematics had to do with counting; the
earliest music with the organization of sounds into rhythmic patterns.
This fact was probably a stimulus for the comment by the mathematician and philosopher, Leibniz, that "Music is the pleasure that the
human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is
counting."
As the ancient civilizations expanded so did mathematics and
music. Both were treated as practical arts and maintained through
tradition by the priestly castes. The ideas which worked in mathematics and the melodies and rhythms which pleased in music were the
things that were preserved and handed down from generation to generation.
When at last, Pythagoras arrived on the scene (c. 540 B.C.)
and conceived the structure of the universe as being ruled by number, music became a cornerstone of his philosophy. So it was that the
origin of music as an experimental science coincided with the birth of
mathematics as a deductive science.
Legend has it that Pythagoras was the first man to identify the
mathematical basis of the "pleasure principle" in music. He found that
a simple numerical correspondence existed between the musical
tones that were preferred in the music of his time.3 So important was
this discovery that the Pythagoreans granted to mathematics the
power "to make visible the invisible." From that time on, music theory
became firmly entrenched in education as a branch of mathematics. It
joined arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as an essential part of the

classical quadrivium which served as the basic curriculum for 2000

years.
Throughout the MiddleAges, the Pythagorean monochord4
served as the essential pedagogical instrument in music education.
Generations of singers and instrumentalists were instructed in proper
ear training and intonation by this means.
It was through Pythagorean theory that the music of western
civilization became standardized in numerical relationships, leading to
the adoption of scales and modes which still persist in the composition of music today. Most particularly it provided a basis for the accurate construction and tuning of instruments.
With the purity of intervals so defined, a standard of reference
was provided which finally permitted the development of polyphony
and functional harmony, the most unique contributions of western
civilization to the art of music.
Polyphony was a method for combining melodic lines simultaneously. By the time of the Renaissance it had evolved as a complex
and tightly ordered system of composition. The equality of melodic
lines was maintained by a mathematical structure of rhythmic proportions and a carefully formulated regulation of dissonance. Harmony,
as such, occurred as accidental conjunctions of the intervals which
vertically aligned themselves in the logical progressions of the melodic parts.
Around the year 1600, a change came about in musical practice that was to have the most profound impact on the course of musical development. What happened was that the vocal parts became
particularized in the roles they carried in the musical fabric. The sop-

rano became the vehicle for melody and the bass carried the weight
of the harmony. The middle parts were subordinated to the role of
fillers, rounding out the chordal structure. This new style which
stressed the declamatory power of the harmonic content became
known as homophony and it succeeded in adding a new dimension to
music, analogous to the earlier Renaissance invention of perspective
in painting.
Significantly, we find that at this same time Descartes and Fermat5 were developing the foundations of analytic geometry. Thus, algebra and geometry were being forged into a unified language that
would carry mathematical thought into the creation of a multi-dimensional calculus.
In both music and mathematics, the main problem to be solved
at this time was that of directional motion. In music this was accomplished by the creation of tonality and in mathematics by the theory of
gravity. The problems were essentially related. As the musicologist,
Manfred Bukofzer, wrote: "Tonality may be defined as a system of
chordal relations based on the attraction of a tonal center. This tonic
formed the center of gravitation for the other chords. It is no mere
metaphor if tonality is explained in terms of gravitation. Both tonality
and gravitation were discoveries of the baroque period made at exactly the same time.,,

Newton developed the calculus as an essential tool for the

presentation of his theory of gravitation. 7 From that point on the scientific advancement of musical theory was to be grounded in this
mathematical discipline. It was finally to culminate in a complete ex-

planation of vibrating mechanisms (which produce sounds) and Fourier's ultimate theorem for harmonic analysis of sounds.
Along the way, the development of logarithms (1614) provided
Mersenne (1635) with the proper tool for calculating the intervals in
equal temperament. Not only did this permit the construction of harmonic instruments like the piano, but it also expanded tonality by encouraging free modulation to distant keys. 8
For the past 400 years the physics of music has grown to encompass and influence almost every aspect of the art of music. By
the time Helmholtz was to write his definitive work, Sensations of
Tone, in the late 19th century, most of the important acoustical facts
about music had been discovered. Helmholtz succeeded in placing
the science of musical acoustics on a firm experimental foundation.
With the discovery of electricity and its technological possibilities,
measuring devices have been perfected to confirm the experimental
hypotheses of this science.
These technological advances have had a tremendous effect
on music. The standardization and perfection of musical instruments
is a direct result of this recent knowledge. Furthermore, the recording
and reproduction of sounds has made music universally accessible.
And finally, we are beginning to realize the potentialities for musical
composition through the synthesis of sounds by electronic means. All
of these advances would have been incomprehensible without the
great surge of mathematical knowledge which culminated in the 19th
century and which is still being extended today.
As you proceed through this unit following the details of the interaction between music and mathematics, be aware of the subtleties

of the interrelationship. Music is basically an inductive art. Innovations and stylistic changes arise out of the artistic vision of individuals
who are immersed in the problems of finding new modes of expressing their own unique musical personalities.
In the development of every musical style experimentation precedes formulation. Thus, tonality was being exploited by many composers to control the direction of harmonic motion several years before Rameau codified its rules in his theoretical writings. Similarly,
Schoenberg had to trace his own path through post-Wagnerian chromatic harmony to a series of experimental compositions which abandoned tonality before he could set down the rules for his twelve tone
system.
Before our current period of musical history, composers were
seldom conversant with the mathematical foundations of their art.
Proceeding intuitively, they were able to develop logical systems of
composition which are only now becoming accessible to mathematical analysis. Computer theory has made it possible to generalize historical musical styles in a mathematical form and give promise of synthesizing new ones. 9
Mathematics has also helped to illuminate some of the psychologica and physiological processes involved in the perception of music. The marvelous structure of the human ear in combination with its
neural path to the brain permits a most sensitive discrimination of the
aural information it receives. The hearing sense allows for a definition
of tone as distinguished from noise and what is even more important
for musical perception, it can differentiate between tones which are
received simultaneously. 10 Thus, harmony, which is dependent

upon the functioning of tones when they are sounded together, is a

physiological possibility.
Finally we must be thankful for the unique capacity of the human brain to recognize and store musical patterns. Without this capacity, the perception of melody, rhythm, and musical form would be impossible.
There have been many attempts since the time of Plato to explain why we respond to music as we do. Musicians, philosophers,
aestheticians, and scientists have all engaged in the fascinating
search to understand the psychology of the human response to music. Recent advances in acoustical theories of music 11 have begun
to emphasize the importance of noise elements in the production and
perception of musical sounds. Philosophically, this seems to say that
the human aspect of music is a function of its aural imperfections.
This infers that emotional effects in music are created by deliberate
deviations from the written score. 12
The point of view adopted in the present text is that one must
understand the standards of reference or idealizations of a system
first, before the attempt is made to account for transient effects and
departures from the norm. This is not to deny the importance of such
variables as factors in musical perception but rather to place them in
proper perspective. No matter how detailed a musical score is, the
realization in live performances will always be different. That is what
makes music such an exciting human experience. Yet, the essential
architecture of this experience must always emanate from the logical
formulations written into the score by the composer. The interpretive
art can be no more than a revelation of what is contained therein.

Acoustical theories of music which focus on the atomization of

individual sounds and try to suggest that musical meaning originates
from the interplay of noise and tone are somewhat guilty of myopia in
the interpretation of their new-found discoveries. They tend to underestimate the importance in musical cognition of formal design, as revealed in harmonic,melodic, and rhythmic structures and their relationships.
No mathematical theory of music will ever be successful until it
can logically account for the total succession of events that make up
a musical composition. In music, as it is in physics, we still lack a
"unified field theory" to explain its grand design.
MATHEMATICS AND MUSIC
Reference Notes to Introduction
1. To say that computers "compose" music is an oversimplification.
Human beings set the parameters and direct the machine to deliver
the possibilities of tonal patterns within these parameters.
See Hiller and Isaacson.
2. Though many may question the esthetic significance of the
product.
3. A detailed coverage of Pythagorean music theory is given in the
succeeding chapters.
4. The monochord was an experimental device which had led to the
basic ideas of Pythagorean music theory.
5. The stimulus of perspective in painting to the development of projective geometry by Desargues about this time is well covered in
Kline, Ch. XI.

6. Bukofzer, p. 12.
7. It should be noted, however, that in his earliest presentation of
the theory, Newton relied upon synthetic geometry for his deductive
arguments in order to assure that his ideas would be intelligible to
the scientific community of his time.
8. The most famous compositions employing the new system of equal
temperament were J. S. Bach's "Well Tempered Clavichord."
9. See Hiller and Isaacson.
10. See Jeans, Science and Music, p. 245ff.
11. Winckel, Music, Sound, and Sensation, A Modern Exposition.
12. A good example of this are the so-called "blue" notes of Jazz. Or,
for opera lovers, consider Caruso's sobbing end of phrases.